Jane Campion is still one of cinema’s Bright Stars

Jane Campion is in a right grump and isn’t prepared to play nice. ‘I think it’s the jet lag,’ she groans, ‘it makes me grumpy. Is it OK to express that in England?’ ‘No,’ I tease, ‘you should always say: “I’m fine.”‘

Wellington-born Campion, like her ‘stone the Kiwis’ accent, may be unapologetically un-English, but her latest film, Bright Star, quintessentially is. It’s a swoonsome, star-crossed love story between romantic poet John Keats (Ben Wishaw) and feisty 19-year-old Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish).

That the 25-year-old Keats is not only impoverished (thus ineligible) but busy dying of tuberculosis in between penning Fanny some of the most exquisite odes in the English literature makes it all most terribly poignant.

It’s certainly a ‘kit-on’ world away from Campion’s last film, In The Cut, the grimy 2003 erotic thriller with steamy scenes starring Meg Ryan. ‘Yeah, that made me wonder too,’ laughs Campion, ‘but I don’t think: “OK I did some sexy stuff, now I’m going to do some innocent stuff.”

‘All I can say is I had a very intense reaction to reading Keats’s love letters. The story’s so tender and sensitive and they were so brave. I thought: “f***, this is what we’re all here on this planet for.”‘

As you may suspect, Bright Star, despite being set around Jane Austen’s time, isn’t your typical prissy bonnet drama – a ‘boring’ and ‘strait-jacketed’ creation Campion finds inexplicable.

‘If you read first-hand accounts from that period, it’s obviously just the same old slouches and grumps as we have today. People lolled around on sofas – in fact in Hogarth’s sketches they’re all having sex all over the living room!

‘This “proper” thing, I don’t know where it comes from. It’s about as real as what we think is really going on between Becks and Victoria.’

Campion has her own celeb mates – she was at Nicole Kidman’s wedding (they became pals while shooting The Portrait Of A Lady). But she keeps her feet, clad in kick-ass biker boots, firmly on the ground.

Today, in her miniskirt, biker jacket, long, grey Patti Smith hair and with a prominent CND symbol round her neck (‘it reminds me to be peaceful’) she’s still clearly a product of the feminist 1970s. ‘We wanted things to feel more real, more daring,’ she says.

She admits Bright Star isn’t daring ‘except that it deals with a poet’, but it was a challenge ‘to create that real pure being from the actors without having them “performing”.’

Ironically, that commitment for natural authenticity led to her casting Aussie-born Cornish. ‘I was really expecting to have an English actress, but there’s something about the way that Australian girls are brought up that makes them less submissive.

It’s quite visible when you think of all the Australian actresses around. And it made Abbie stand out. I think Fanny Brawne really couldn’t be conventional.’

When I ask Campion what she might picture herself doing during the Regency period, I receive a typically blunt response: ‘I’d probably be dead, because I had asthma as a kid’.

Yet I can’t help picturing her as a radical reformer. One of only three female directors to be nominated for an Oscar and the only woman to have ever won a Palme d’Or (for The Piano in 1993), she’s strident in her opinions on why there are still so few women directors. ‘I just think it’s a reflection of men and women’s opportunities in the world.

I’m so sick of people going “Whoop! There are two per cent more female directors!” So, now there are only 95 per cent guy directors? Whatever.’ Her solution? ‘I think women should be given 50 per cent of the films to make. I’m not kidding!

‘It’ll change the world overnight. Women see things differently, so it’ll be better for everyone,’ she decrees with an authority that recalls Harvey Keitel’s description ‘Jane Campion is a goddess and I’m a mere mortal. I fear being struck by lightning bolts’.

‘It’s not fair – and that’s it. It’s human rights, I want equality,’ she says. If anyone can, Campion can.Bright Star is in cinemas from Friday.